


A Scar That Looks Just Like You

by waltzmatildah



Category: Chicago Fire, Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Compulsion, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-03
Updated: 2013-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-28 01:31:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/668740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It is Chicago where she sees him...</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Scar That Looks Just Like You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [citron_presse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/citron_presse/gifts).



_We’ll be the lovers with the poison cup…_   
  
  
  


Katherine has always had a somewhat tenuous relationship with Chicago. She can count the amount of times she’s physically visited the city over the centuries that have made up her life on one hand, but that doesn’t make their significance any less telling.

Blood-shed and betrayal. Not all of it hers. 

The blood _or_ the betrayal.

But there’s something about the place that draws her back. A reflection, she supposes, of the perception of unfinished business still held within its walls. 

Of stories not quite played out to completion.

Of fairytales and romance, of gluttony and death and morbid horror.

All her favourite things.

 

 

 

It is Chicago where she sees him.

He’s walking down the street, one arm looped casually along the narrow line of a set of shoulders belonging to a blonde girl she doesn’t recognise. It’s dark, but not too late. Heavy cloud cover blankets any trace of the moon that might be hanging above them in the night sky, but as they pass beneath a streetlight on the side of the road opposite to where she’s standing, the double take she does could be deemed unintentionally comical.

If Katherine did unintentionally comical.

Which she absolutely does not.

He laughs, like light against nerve endings she’d guessed well and truly numb by now, says something she only half catches, something about pubs or strip clubs, and drops a familiar kiss onto the top of the blonde girl’s head as they walk passed her and further down the street.

 

 

 

She follows them for thirteen minutes. Doesn’t even both to be surreptitious in her stalking. Spends the slow turning seconds comparing what she can see now with the eidetic memories she retains of him from _before_ ; searches desperately for irregularities that might explain a case of little more than mistaken identity.

She finds none.

And an unfamiliar spark of something that might taste a little like _hope_ flares; inexplicable.

 

 

 

She never loved him, and it’s a point she repeats as she watches him, the words on a loop inside her skull.

_Never, never, never…_

Desperate self-preservation or the truth?

She can no longer tell the difference.

And the difference is no longer relevant.

 

 

 

He disappears into an apartment complex, the blonde girl still pulled protectively to his side; and she can’t help the swell of exasperation that builds, because _of course_. Not the girl.

Just the idea of her.

Katherine could never be that girl. At least, not genuinely.

She can’t quite fathom why she _cares_ …

 

 

 

He’s supposed to be dead. 

But Katherine is not naive enough to think that death is any kind of absolute finality, and his presence here is not as shocking as it probably should be. Dark magic, vampirism, resurrections. She has seen all three work with varying degrees of success over the centuries, and she thinks, absently, there have no doubt been less deserving recipients of a second, third, fourth chance at life than Mason Lockwood.

_Mason Lockwood_. 

The sound of his name rolls around in her head and she smiles. Remembers. His endless eagerness to please her. It had been irritating once. 

Until it wasn’t.

She’s blinks and in the fleeting black she sees Damon Salvatore, his fist shoved carelessly through skin and bone and breath. The anger that comes with the recollection, a more familiar sensation.

 

 

 

She spends three days just watching. 

And it takes her half that long to figure out the kicker: He is most definitely _not_ Mason Lockwood. Or, at least;

_Not anymore..._

She hears workmates call him Kelly. Or Severide. Or, sometimes, _dick_. Which seems kind of harsh. She develops an odd protectiveness of him from afar, something inexplicable and unfamiliar and disconcertingly _fun_. She bundles up the main antagonist one evening, someone whose own name she hasn’t bothered to learn, and _convinces_ him to be more considerate in the future.

She tries not to think about why, settles instead on investigating the existence of werewolf doppelgangers and the possibility that she’s not as unique as she’d always been lead to believe. A revelation that is not as disappointing as it once might have been.

 

 

 

The most interesting development is the drug habit.

Prescription narcotics. 

Only, minus the prescription.

The thought makes her gums ache with desire. And _oh_ , Katherine knows from heady experience how human blood, and he _is_ most definitely human, laced generously with opioids has that little extra... something.

_Champagne_ , she thinks.

Seals his fate. 

 

 

 

She carefully engineers a meeting; moves through the choreography of the entirely manipulated ‘meet and greet’ with a deftness she has perfected over the decades and centuries that have lead up to now. If he recognises who she is, _what she is_ , during their brief encounter, then he conceals his reaction completely. She suspects however, and with a wicked curl of her lips, that he has absolutely no idea...

“Anna sent me,” she says, the door to his apartment swung wide, his sense of self-preservation, non-existent. Anna did no such thing.

His eyes, _Mason’s eyes_ , travel the length of her, curious.

And, she thinks, _Oh, honey, I know…_

“She did?” 

He fails to mask the hope that bleeds through the two syllables.

“Yeah,” Katherine answers, lashes lowered as she presses the blister pack of oxys into the palm of his hand. “Yeah, she did.”

 

 

 

His eyes are drug-buzz bright as she drags his t-shirt over his head. She has already tasted him, just a little sip, he doesn’t remember, he can’t.

It is all she can do to stop herself from draining him to dried out on the spot.

His fingers are skittish, they cross her stomach, curl into her hair, tangle between her own, like maybe he can’t decide what to do with them first. 

She laughs, tilts her head back a little, wraps her hands around his throat and pretends to squeeze.

For a beat.

 

 

 

It’s a month later and she’s waking up with her legs twisted between his, the heady taste of him still curled in her gut. The constant compulsion is wearing him thin; there are shadows beneath the heavy hang of his lashes that he’s having more and more difficulty explaining away. 

She contemplates opening her veins up to him, giving him just enough to get him through his next shift, but not so much that she ruins the game altogether.

His neck is broken, you see. And the simple knowledge of this fragility makes her hum.

Her neck was broken once too.

 

 

 

She withholds the narcotics until he’s _practically begging_. She’ll make him forget the pain in the end, she already knows this, but she likes the way it makes him need her.

He’ll slump to the tile at the base of the shower, hot water, scalding, and she’ll count and count and count and count and then she’ll find him; she’ll lift him up and tell him that she’s sorry, _oh, baby_ , that she’ll be here sooner next time.

Next time…

Next time…

And his hands will tremble as he pops the pills from the silver foil. He’ll dry swallow a palm-full even as he’s tripping backwards towards the bed and pulling her down with him.

Grateful.

 

 

 

She waits until he’s well and truly high before she sinks her teeth into his broken neck and joins him.


End file.
